Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-284250 discloses art in which the direction of the sheet set for printing is identified based on the RFID (Radio Frequency-Identification) tag embedded in the sheet. In the disclosed art, the RFID tag on the sheet is scanned to detect the tag position or the sheet direction information, whereby the reverse/obverse side or top/bottom side of the sheet to be fed is identified.
In the art disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-284250, in the case where the same sheet is repeatedly used for printing, it is difficult to reflect the previously printed content on the sheet in the next printing. In the case where an image corresponding to the currently printed image is formed on the same sheet at the next printing operation, for example, if the next printing is performed with the currently printed content not being accurately remembered (for example, the next printing is performed after a long passage of time from the previous printing), the correlation between the current and the subsequent printing results fails to satisfy the user's requirement, resulting in unintended printing. Also, in the case where a first user prints an image and then a second user prints another image that reflects the image printed by the first user, an unintended image is obtained in the end if the accurate information has not been shared between the users.